“Eh! What?” cried the erstwhile New Englander, following the indication of my finger, “The pot? Why, don’t you know what that’s for?”
“No,” I answered.
“Why, that is a collection the sheik is taking up to buy you a ticket to Damascus on the railroad.”
I picked up my knapsack from the floor and stepped into the highway. The sheik and several bystanders threw themselves upon me with cries of dismay. It was no use attempting to escape from a dozen horny hands. I permitted myself to be led back to the stool and sat down with the knapsack across my knees. The sheik addressed me in soothing tones, pointing at the pot with every third word. The others resumed their seats on the floor, rolled new cigarettes, and fell quiet once more. With one leap I sprang from the stool into the street and set off at top speed down the highway, a screaming, howling, ever-increasing but ever more distant throng at my heels. A half-hour later I gained the summit of the neighboring range and slid down the opposite slope onto the highway to Damascus.
For miles the road ascended sharply, elbowing its way through narrow gorges, or crawling along the face of a mountain where its edge was a yawning precipice. The giant cedars of the first slopes had given way to clumps of stunted dwarfs, cowering in deep-cut ravines behind protecting shoulders of the range. Few were the villages, and being low and flat and built of the same calcareous rock as the mountains, they escaped the eye until one was almost upon them. In every hamlet one or more of the householders marched back and forth on the top of his dwelling, dragging after him a great stone roller and chanting a mournful dirge that seemed to cheer him on in his labor. At first sight these flat roofs seem to be of heavy blocks of stone. In reality they are made of branches and bushes, plastered over with mud, and, were the rolling neglected for a fortnight in this rainy season, they would soon sag and fall in of their own weight. More frequent than the villages were the ruins of a more pretentious generation, standing bleak and drear on commanding hillsides and adding to the haggard desolation. At long intervals appeared a line of camels, plodding westward with a tread of formal dignity, a company of villagers on horseback, or a straggling band of evil-eyed Bedouins astride lean asses. Never a human being alone, never a man on foot, and never a traveler without a long gun slung across his shoulders. The villagers stared at me open-mouthed, the camel drivers leered sarcastically, the scowling Bedouins halted to watch my retreating form as if undecided whether I was worth the robbing.
The snow, which, seen from Beirut, seemed to cover the entire summit of the range in impenetrable drifts, lay in isolated patches along the way. Here was no such Arctic realm as Abdul had pictured. The air was crisp at noonday; by night, no doubt, it would have been bitter cold—mere autumn weather to us of northern clime. But it was easy to understand why those accustomed to the perpetual summer of the coast had fancied the passage an unprecedented hardship.
At the summit, the snow lay deeper. Far below stretched a rectangular tableland, a fertile plain dotted with clusters of dwellings, and shut in on every side by mountain ranges. Across it, like a white ribbon, lay the Damascus highway, growing smaller and smaller, to be lost in tortuous windings in the foothills beyond.
I reached the plain by evening and halted in a hamlet not far off the city of Zakleh. Among the heavy-handed peasants who surrounded me was one who had labored long enough in Italy to have picked up a smattering of her language. We of the West might well take lessons in hospitality from the Arab. Imagine a Syrian arriving at night and on foot in, let us say, a village of rural Kansas; a Syrian in native costume who, in answer to the questions put to him could do no more than point to the road across the prairie and gurgle some such word as “Chikak! Cheekako!” each time with a different accent. An Arabic-speaking villager, arriving on the scene, would, possibly, pause to inquire the stranger’s wants. He might direct him to an inn, but he would not consider it his duty to put himself to the annoyance of seeing that he found it. Such was not the Italian-speaking Arab’s notion of the proper treatment of strangers. He took personal charge of me at once, led the way to the caravanserai, acted as interpreter, quarreled with the proprietor when he tried to overcharge me, and to save me a dismal evening surrounded by a jabbering multitude, remained until late at night.
I took leave of him at the door of a stone stable—the only lodging which the hamlet offered. The few camel drivers already gathered there were well supplied with bags and blankets which they made no offer to share with me. When I had watched them chasing through the mysteries and hiding-places of their manifold garments the nimble creatures with which they were infected, I lay down on the cobblestone floor without a sigh of regret. Long before morning, however, I should gladly have accepted the most flea-bitten covering. The kodak that served me as a pillow rattled hour after hour with my shivering. I shivered until my neck and arms ached with the exertion of vainly trying to hold myself still, and never before had I realized the astonishing length of a December night.
I put off with the first suspicion of dawn and was already halfway across the plain when the sun climbed the mountain rampart to the eastward. To the natives the morning was bitter cold. Bands of laborers on their way to the fields grinned at me sympathetically and passed their hands over the scarfs wound round and round their necks and heads. They were certain that, with face and ears unprotected, I was suffering acutely; yet each and all of them, in low slippers, was bare of leg halfway to the knee.